http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE LATE, GREAT political scientist Aaron Wildavsky once surveyed the
landscape and attempted to total the number of oppressed victims in the
U.S. After tallying up the poor, the elderly, women, youths, the
unemployed, non-whites, and every other aggrieved group, Wildavsky
cheekily estimated that no less than 374 percent of Americans are
members of an oppressed minority.

The number continues to rise. And the ululations of the aggrieved - I
am victim, hear me roar! - continue to echo from the far corners of the
fruited plain.

In Boston this month, multi-ethnic tempers are flaring over a newly
identified hate symbol: the loathsome shamrock. The city’s housing
authority had blacklisted – er, listed – the Irish symbol as an emblem
of intolerance along with the Nazi swastika and the Confederate flag.
An outraged Boston Globe reader wrote of being “personally offended” by
a shamrock hanging in a tax collector’s window. Government-employed
diversity officers defended the housing agency’s symbol-cleansing
efforts to ensure racial tolerance.

What’s next – a boycott of the Lucky Charms leprechaun?

In Tampa, Fla. a few years ago, Latino organizers launched a
full-throated protest over an oppressive "hate crime" against
immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices? A ban on welfare benefits?
Police brutality? Try the menacing presence of Dinky the Taco Bell
Chihuahua, the star of a popular ad campaign run by the Mexican-style
fast-food chain. The diminutive doggie craves tacos and burritos. His
signature phrase, "Yo quiero Taco Bell" (I want Taco Bell), now rolls
off the tongues of teens who couldn't stay awake in Spanish class.

"I think it is very demeaning," complained Gabriel Cazares, president
of the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens,
the country's oldest Hispanic civil-rights group, to the Tampa Tribune.
He and a few other LULAC chapter heads boycotted the chain and wanted
Dinky shut down. Cazares blasted Taco Bell's insensitivity as
"criminal" and complained the ad campaign "leads to the type of
immigrant bashing that Hispanics are now up against."

Only in America can a four-legged mascot for junk food be held
responsible for the collective civil-rights violations of an entire
ethnic group.

In Seattle, a handful of angry Asian-American activists picketed
ObaChine, celebrity-chef Wolfgang Puck and his wife's pan-Asian eatery.
The aggrieved protested a 1920s portrait of a Chinese man drinking tea
that hangs near the entrance. Taken from a vintage French colonial tea
ad, the same image, chosen by Puck's wife and business partner Barbara
Lazaroff, has hung in the couple's Beverly Hills restaurant for 15
years without a complaint. But Ron Chew, local director of an Asian art
museum, told me the portrait embodied a "set of attitudes that is
racist at its core" and "belittles" Asian people.

Well, this Asian American trekked down to ObaChine to have a look and
found the out-of-reach menu prices far more belittling than the
portrait. Yes, it looks like a Chinese man from a century or more ago.
That's not an unreasonable image for a restaurant that serves Chinese
food to adopt.

Yet, some community activists demanded that the business take down the
picture - or at the very least, lighten the skin, lower the brows, and
widen the eyes of the ObaChine man. These protesters wouldn't be
appeased until the ethnic portrait is completely whitewashed and a
tea-drinker who looks more like Roy Rogers hangs in ObaChine's lobby.
Coercion, rather than honest communication, is their ultimate goal.

As Lazaroff told me, "All this does is foster anger and sensitize
people to race in the wrong way. They don't care that I run a business
with hundreds of employees of every ethnic, racial and socioeconomic
background."

When their politically correct crusades degenerate from the sublime to
the ridiculous, grievance activists quickly invoke personal pain and
past history as absolute defenses. Chew told me about kids who made fun
of the shape of his eyes (juvenile behavior to which I was also
subjected, but got over in second grade.) Cazares, the anti-Taco Bell
activist, complained about people who called him "Taco Bill."

It's time for self-aggrandizing grievance advocates to grow up. No one
denies the barbarism of Chinese exclusion laws, the Japanese
internment, or physical violence against migrant workers. But bullying
innocent businesses and individuals into insult avoidance won't change
the past - and will only make future efforts to prevent bona fide
discrimination more difficult. These public-relations stunts make for
sensational news and enhance the visibility of activists, but they
trivialize serious violations of civil rights.

Ultimately, the problem with indiscriminate complainers isn't the color
of their skin. It's the
thinness.

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